http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
IT IS A SAD SPECTACLE. President Bill Clinton, desperate to
salvage his scandal-laced legacy, crisscrossing the nation proposing new
spending programs and regulatory initiatives with wild abandon. He seems
determined to jettison his one good bequest to the nation: a less loony
Democratic Party.

Clinton's moderation was always heavier on rhetoric than practice.

Nevertheless, his early political defeats helped moderate his worst excesses.

That made left-wing social engineers apoplectic. They need not have
worried. Clinton is busy seeking to bring back the good ol' liberal days of
regulation.

The Clinton administration has some 4,538 regulations in process, 137 of
which are "economically significant" and will cost at least $100 million
each. The number of these big rules is up nearly a fifth from just a year
before.

The biggest regulator is the Department of Transportation, followed by the
Environmental Protection Agency; each account for more than one-tenth of the
total. The Departments of Treasury, Commerce, Agriculture and Interior follow.

Last year, the Federal Register, Uncle Sam's compendium of rules, ran
71,161 pages, a 4 percent increase over 1998. That is the highest since 1980,
during the glorious Jimmy Carter presidency.

The federal government spent about $1.7 trillion last year. Much of it was
wasted, but at least there was theoretical accountability since Congress
voted the money. Not so regulation, which Thomas Hopkins of the Rochester
Institute of Technology figures cost Americans about $758 billion, almost 45
percent of official federal budget outlays.

All told, in 1999, every American family paid about $7,400 a year for the
privilege of being watched, controlled, prodded, nannied and governed. That
is essentially a separate income tax of almost 20 percent per household.

This is, in effect, taxation without representation. As Clyde Wayne Crews
of the Competitive Enterprise Institute puts it, "Regulatory initiatives
allow government to direct private-sector resources to a significant degree
without much public fuss."

Politicians pass bills expressing popular sentiments (e.g., cleaner air
and water). Unknown staffers buried within the bowels of the bureaucracy then
write the real law.

There was a time when reformers thought the answer was to elect
Republicans. Give the GOP control of Congress, it was said, and they will
rein in the regulators. Now we know better.

Four years ago, Congress enacted the Congressional Review Act, which
requires all agencies to submit their rules to Congress. Lawmakers then have
60 days to use an expedited process to block the proposals. Not once has
Congress acted.

Perhaps every regulation advanced by the administration has been a good
one. All 4,684 final rules issued in 1999. And the 4,899 implemented the year
before. And the 4,584 imposed in 1997. More than 14,167 new regulations
passed after Congress approved the CRA, and apparently not one warranted
rejection.

Regulators rarely compare the relative degree and likelihood of different
harms. Thus, Uncle Sam often focuses his time and our money on minute risks.

Several rules, ranging from benzene to dichloropropane to formaldehyde to
chloroform, are estimated to cost from hundreds of millions to literally
trillions of dollars per life saved.

Even when regulations make sense in theory, Washington frequently dictates
specific outcomes when greater flexibility would allow individuals and
businesses to achieve better results for less. Many environmental rules
suffer from this flaw.

Reform should start with electing a Congress that legislates and delegates
less, and a president committed to restricting the quasi-laws now flowing
from the federal bureaucracy. Clyde Wayne Crews also suggests several
procedural changes in his new study, "Ten Thousand Commandments," published
by CEI (www.cei.org).

For instance, Congress should require publication of all available
economic data, create a regulatory report card by program and agency, and
establish a regulatory budget. Most important, in his view, is "congressional
approval - rather than agency approval - of both regulations and regulatory
costs."

This is an agenda that Gore, busy pandering to the usual Democratic
interest groups, is unlikely to advance. Thus, it is up to George W. Bush is
demonstrate that he is serious about being a "reformer with results." The
result we need is to return today's regulatory state to the genuine rule of
law.

JWR contributor Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
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